Presets – Camera Profile Presets

First off, a big thanks to all of the readers/visitors who were at Photoshop World last week and came up and introduced themselves. I had a great time there and it was so cool to get to meet some of the people that visit/post here. Now, on to the presets…

A couple weeks ago, I posted a video on the beta Camera Profiles that Adobe has released over at the Adobe Labs website. At the end of the video I mentioned creating Develop presets for those profiles you like the most, so I decided to do just that for myself. Then I figured I might as well share them this week so you don’t have to do the work. The really neat part about using presets for these profiles is that you don’t have to select them in the Camera Calibration tab to see what they look like. Instead, just hover over the preset name in the Presets panel and the Navigator will show you a preview so you can quickly see what each looks like. I’ve created presets for all of the Nikon and Canon profiles (separate downloads below). The one prerequisite is that you’ll need to have the camera profiles installed in order to use them so make sure you go back and watch the video to see how.

READ THIS FIRST: These presets only work if you’ve installed the profiles first. They are not the profiles themselves, but presets to apply the profiles. Also, since the profiles only work with Raw or DNG files, the same holds true with the presets.

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

64 Comments

Michael

July 25, 2011

Hi Matt,

Great tips what you got here, tks a lot for sharing your knowledge!

I use Lightroom 3.2 (had some troubles with 3.4.1, so I regret to version 3.2). I have installed the camera profiles as per your instructions in the video, but I can’t open the video with the instructions for installing your presets, I got a Canon and would like to see how these presets work. Can you help me, please?

Hi, I use LR 2.3. I’ve also installed the presets, but they seem to make no difference at first. When I’m hovering over the presets the preview image does not change nor does the image when click on the presets.

But this changes when I first enter the Camera Calibration section and change the profile. After that, when I hover over the presets, the Navigator Preview shows the changes and clicking on them changes the image.

It is very difficult to find a a profile, that gives a picture close to the real out-of-camera picture…
I suppose it is better to build a real Camera Calibration profile using Adobe tools.
And much better is to use a special color grid to calibrate your camera. That’s the most precise way.

I have installed the beta camera profiles from the Adobe web site I am running LR V2.5 but cannot see them in the camera calibration section of the develop module. I am shooting a Panasonic G1 and converting the raw files out of the camera to DNG at import. What am I not doing? Are there no G1 profiles available at this time?

I just watched the video on camera profiles. I’ve even gone back and forth with the NAPP Help Desk. The Adobe camera list includes the Sony Alpha 900 but no specific profiles show up under the Camera Calibration Panel. All that is listed is Adobe Standard and ACR 4.6. Why can’t I see anything for the Alpha 900?

I am a bit stumped and hope you or someone can help. I loaded the camera profiles beta 2 and your LR templates but I am not seeing the camera profile anywhere inside Lightroom or in Camera Raw. How is one supposed to make use of those camera profile (.dcp) files ???

I am at my wits end with trying to get LR to render D3 and D3x images correctly and have spent months fiddling and trying things but it still messes up the rendering and I cannot believe that there is not some simple way to tell LR to render these files correctly. Every other imaging program I have ever used, Capture NX, DXO, CaptureOne, even IrfanView, all show the D3/x files the way they should appear but Lightroom/Adobe seem to have their own idea of what the image should look like and no matter how much tweaking I do it’s still not right. For instance I may be able to tweak the develop setting for one set of images and get them to look “ok” but then that same set of tweaks applied to other images makes them look even worse than what LR rendered them.

What irks me most is that when new images are imported into LR their thumbnails look 100% like they looked in camera, after double clicking on an image to view it at 1:1 for a mere 2-3 seconds the full size image looks perfect but then LR does it’s rendering guesswork and messes it up. I wish there was some way to tell LR not to render the file but rather just display it 1:1 based on the embedded thumbnail, it seems to have the ability to do this for the first 2-3 seconds after opening it at 1:1.

This is the one and only thing keeping me from using Lightroom in a production environment and I wish this was not the case. I have worked with numerous professional image editing suites and LR is the only one to not be able to render my files correctly. Lightroom hands down beats any other software as far as cataloging and ease of raw processing goes and if I can resolve this one major problem I would put it into full swing. I just cannot manage images where I cannot see what the image truly looks like without spending time fiddling with it to appear sort of correctly.

Love this set of presets it sure saves time in the sense I forget about these profiles. Now if Adobe or someone can make these profiles work across camera manufacturers. I know camera manufacturers more than likely won’t like this but it sure would be really cool.

I’ve moved over to Lightroom because of these coloUr profiles. Because I shoot Nikon the white balance is ALWAYS wrong so I combine the colour mode with a white balance and sharpening (with medium or strong contrast) for a few presets.

I can then use them on import or for fine tuning in the develope module.

The profiles are at the Adobe Labs site and they are only beta versions for now. To get the presets, which are an entirely different thing, click on the link at the top of this page (“Click here to download the Canon Camera Profile presets.”)

Does anybody have a link to the actual profiles? All I can find and download from the Adobe Labs site is a set of beta 2 profiles that do not include the ones needed for these presets. Search does not seem to find them.

Hello Matt, I am Miguel A. a photographer from Mexico City. I have been taking you courses at Kelby’s and they have been very helpfull, I have been doing it for like 2 weeks and been learning a lot.
I want to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind. The first one is I have Light Room 2 and the option to merge my photos as panoramas and the rest are not working, the appear in grey light color, so I don’t know if I have to activate some where thet option. The other question is, how good it is and how to calibrate my camera with light room, I have the Nikon D200.
I tried to download your Nikon templates, but they don’t function, there are no changes, I imported them just as you said.
Well thank you very much for your time and congratulations on your fine work. I am sending you my site so you can take a look at it.
Hope to hear from you soon.

Matt, I loaded the camera profiles into lightroom. What a great starting point! Better skin tones, no blown out highlights, Much better shadow detail. I shoot with a Canon Mark III -Sometimes you do get a bit of a red punch in portrait setting but you can fine tune it in the camera calibration panel and make a preset. What a difference the camera profiles make.

Thanks for all the killer tips Matt!
Here’s one of my own that people may find useful…

If you always want a specific camera profile to be applied at the time of import you can change your default develop settings by selecting Develop > Set Default Settings…

This will essentially save all your current develop panel settings and make them your new “starting point” for newly imported images (note that the settings are also camera specific, so you can have have different default settings for different camera manufacturers and models). If you turn on the check boxes in preferences you can even set different default settings based on camera serial number and/or ISO rating.

I tried posting the links but it looks like this site won’t let me do it (my comment doesn’t appear). So, the only way is to go to the Nikonians web site and search for “benlwong” in the search box. You should then find the thread where I posted the two links. There are actually two different changes you can try and they are both too long to describe in here.

Regarding the general performance of the local adjustments: Matt directed me to another post where it was suggested to “zero” all the adjustments before starting to use the gradient or adjustment brush tools and pressing o (that’s an oh not a zero) to view the mask as you work. So what you would do is press “K” (or click the brush icon) to open the adjustment panel, place all the sliders to zero, press the o key and start making your mask(s). An orange overlay will be visible as you work, which you can toggle on and off with the o key. Make your masks and gradients and then make the adjustments. Its a workaround, and a bit of a kludge, but it does help a fair amount.

I tried the camera profile presets for the Nikon and it works well. I have the Fuji S5 Pro and I can only hope Adobe will create presets for this camera. Perhaps the final version will include some for this camera.

I am all Mac. My G5 tower at home is running an Ati Radeon 9800 XT (256mb), the iMac at work is on a Nvidia 7300 GT (128) and the MacBook Pro has an ATi Radeon X1600 (128mb). I have read of people with PCs who had performance improvements by accessing the video card control software – that sort of thing does not exist in the Macs (used to – I had video cards that I could adjust back in the pre-OSX days).

What video card do you have? I had a performance issue with LR2 and it seems to be much better now after I changed one setting. I am at work so I cannot tell you what video cards it affects at this moment (only Nvidia).

Matt, Where is the captions that I have talk to you before?????? I couldnt get the video as I dont know whats all about. If you could send me the list of the script that would be great. I’m praying that you considering about the captions not for me but for other’s sake too.

On the lag time in the brush tool, I’m glad it’s not just me. After falling asleep a couple of times, I decided it was a a secret tool that was only useful for Scott K to make videos with and haven’t tried to use it since.

Thanks for the response. In response to your comment in that post, from my POV even a “few seconds” for the adjustment to render is way out of line for professional photo editing software. Add up that time if you are applying a few local changes to, say, 20 picks from a session. Then do that over and over again. Compare to Photoshop and similar types of corrections, or Smart filters in PS. No delay there at all. not one. On my hardware I only see delays with that sort of stuff in PS if I have been at it for a long time and the scratch disk is filling up and/or I am making huge corrections with something like the blur tool.

I have commented on the Adobe forums where there are clearly a good number of people having trouble. My struggle is that I experience it on a range of hardware, so it is unlikely, to me, that it is something odd about my particular setup. Quite often the people who say “no trouble here” have some pretty tricked out systems. Several on the Adobe forums that post about satisfactory performance are running 4 and 8 core machines with well over 4gigs of ram. LR1.x ran decent on my old G4 1.6 Powerbook and had very few moments of delay on my MacBook Pro – only when really pushing it like exporting in the background while continuing to work. Not even worth trying in LR2. A sorry state, I think.

I am going to try the work-around suggested by Markus on that page, in the meantime.

I have not heard of any acknowledgment on Adobe’s part of this issue. If true then that is encouraging, at least. To date on blogs like this and sites such as Layers.com and NAPP everyone acts as if LR2 has no problems at all. The lag and hanging while using the local adjustments is so bad I hardly use them (and I would use them a lot if it were otherwise). One of the best, most attractive features of LR has always been its excellent performance on a wide range of hardware – really outstanding IMO. No longer in LR2. I get a 10 – 15 second delay simply going from the Library to the Develop module or a similar delay going from one image to the next when already in Develop – and this is after I have pre-generated 1:1 Previews. When editing almost 1000 images (normal for an event for me) these delays represent 2 – 4x increase in the time required to finish! That’s $$ out of my pocket.

Steve – I didn’t included Adobe Standard. My guess is that if you’re using these presets it’s because you like the way the vendor’s software rendered the file better (which it does). So, I left Adobe’s out.

Ewan – I’m not intimately familiar with Nikon’s software but, from what I recall, I haven’t seen a “monochrome” profile there. These profiles are only meant to simulate the vendor’s profiles so if it’s not a profile for them, then it won’t be a profile here in LR.

Jerry – Thanks I had a blast too!

Pat – You’ve commented here about this before and I’ve said several times that I’ve experienced the same issue. There’s nothing more I, or anyone at this site, can do. Adobe hasn’t told me of a date they plan to release a fix for this. Even if they did, I wouldn’t be able to give it away here. As always, the best place to voice your frustration about this is the Adobe forums.

I sat in on your Lightroom Session at Photoshop World last week…Great Stuff. The 10 signs that you are a photographer slide show really hit the mark. Any chance you could share that here, or somewhere else. I am certain that my wife and most photog’s significant others would get a chuckle out of it. Thanks and keep up the great work with this blog.

I’ve been using these presets in Lr 2.0 for quite a while now, and have been impressed with the difference they’ve made to the look of many of my images (e.g., the brillance of Fall colors using the vivid preset is amazing.

Thanks for sharing these presets. I noticed that some have had difficulty installing them, but your instructions were great and I had no problem. They appeared in both Lr and ACR.

And by the way – great PhotoWalk in Tampa. Not only was it a lot of fun but Timpano’s was an excellent choice. It was well worth the trip we made from Coral Springs.

Hi Matt,
Great site and thanks for the posts about the profiles, I downloaded them and they really seem to help with some shots (but not all). However, I would like to see you address performance issues with Lightroom 2 that I, and many users, am having. Things like switching to Develop causes delays of as much as 15 seconds or so, herky jerky local adjustments, sliders not responding, Lightroom suddenly spiking on the CPU and so on. I am trying to edit a wedding of more than 900 images and these slowdowns are incredibly frustrating. If I was still using LR1.4, I am confident that I would be done by now! I am experiencing this on both Macs (and a third one at my day job):
MacBook Pro/2.16 Core2Duo/3 gb ram/80 gig HD
PowerMac G5/Dual 2 gig/3.5 ram/Ati Radeon 9800 XT/WD SATA 700GB HD
iMac 24″/2.16 Core2Duo/3gb ram/250gb HD

My gear should be up to it, no?
I don’t write metadata to the files, pre-generate the 1:1 previews, optomize the catalog – all the usual stuff, I think. 1.4 I could use with the catalog on a simple firewire 400 drive – no way with LR2. A complete drag and there don’t seem to be any answers coming from Adobe on the forums etc.

Matt, I installed the Canon presets just fine. In fact, The problem is they don’t do anything. No biggie. I appreciate all the work you do. This is my favorite Lightroom site. The only complaint is that we don’t get a tip each and every day. Thanks.

These are great for Nikon but where is the monochrome one? I like to shoot mono sometimes and they can look great on camera but difficult to achieve the same results in LR – another profile for mono work would be great.

Thanks for the presets Matt – all working fine.
I thought that I had read that the profiles are model specific, but your presets mean that they must just be brand specific?
Did you leave out the Adobe Standard assuming that, like me, most people would have this as their default?

Jessica – Yes, you must have the actual profiles loaded first for these to work. These presets are just a shortcut for applying the profiles, but they don’t actually load the profiles for you – you need to hit the labs.adobe.com website and do that yourself.

I did something wrong, too. I downloaded the profiles from Adobe and installed them, but they don’t show up under Camera Calibration in Lightroom. Your presets imported just fine, but also don’t seem to be altering the photos when used.